Love, Moral Intensity and Governmentality: Representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children in Public Policy

This chapter brings into focus how adults make representative claims to love Indigenous Australian children, to establish a morality that places interventions into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children beyond contestation, and work to legitimise the intense governing of their lives. This chapter is an effort to work against this depoliticising effect. We contest the lives of children in order to contest the future. We govern the lives and bodies of children to make that future more certain. We lay claim to love for children as a moral foundation upon which to place that governmentality beyond contestation. By exploring love and morality through the representative politics of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, I work to complicate our understanding of children’s relationship to democratic politics and to recover a politics of childhood from these depoliticising moves.